Or, welcome to my low-maintenance heck.

You might be saying to yourself, "Why self, that doesn't look like a parking lot at all!"

And you'd be right—It's not.

Meet the old Circuit City in Springfield, Virginia. Believe it or not, I used to shop there when I was in high school (heck, I even applied for a job there)—but it's been sitting vacant for about 10 years now, ever since the company moved closer to the soon-to-be-equally-defunct Springfield Mall.

What does one do with a large commercial building that's been sitting vacant for that long, especially now that we've got the hottest recovery in history (at least according to the President and his puppets in Congress)?

Fairfax County has scooped up a vacated Circuit City site in Springfield, will burn it down and plans to develop a commuter parking facility there.

The property, located at 7039 Old Keene Mill Road, has a land area of 118,000 square feet and would serve several Metrobus and Fairfax Connector routes. The county bought the property for $4.5 million on March 19 from D.C.-based Monument Realty, according to county tax assessment records.

Comments:

Are they burning down the old Long John Silvers and the gas staion too?

#2 Brian C. Ledbetter 09-Apr-2010

It is when it's the fire department that's doing it (they do need their practice, after all).

Re: the other buildings—Nope. The county apparently wasn't able to talk Sunoco into parting with those two pieces of prime 1950's real estate.

For what it's worth, if the County is worried about blight, the proper way to handle this would be through the Blight Abatement Program. File a complaint against the owner and have them tear it down, hopefully at zero cost to the taxpayers of this heavily-taxed county. Once that's done, approach the owner and see if they'd be open to opening a commuter lot on their land—making sure to set their tax rate at zero and allow them to post as many advertisements as they wanted for the next 10 years or so to compensate them for their loss.

This charity with other people's money has to stop, though. Our money trees died a *long* time ago around here.

#3 captainfish 10-Apr-2010

Fire is cheap too. Just hire the local union arsonist and it is done for less than $5,000. Just bring in the Boy Scouts........ oops... those guys are not approved to be out in the public any more..... the local Boys Club to control the spread of the fire and you have your building cleared. Just make sure you bring in the local YMCA to control the Boys from spreading the fire as well. Then you will need to bring in the local VFW to monitor the pedophiles from the YMCA to keep them from spreading the Boys.

Ok, maybe it would be better to just let Bubba drive his monster truck through it.